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Travel
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
No Accident
It was the first Friday of spring break, 1984, when I climbed into the bed of Greg’s compact truck, leaned back against the cab, and watched the keg party fade into the distance as we drove away.
April 2020
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Seven Days In A Sea-Creature Town
Decorah sat in the impact crater of an asteroid that had struck the earth hundreds of millions of years ago. One of the extinct giant sea creatures exhumed from its crust — the shrimp-looking Pentecopterus decorahensis — had been named after the town.
November 2019
Fiction
Goodbye, Sugar Land
I was still exploring my power to hurt others and was continually surprised by how potent a single sentence could be. I watched my mother’s face waver and then crack open.
October 2019
Fiction
When He Was Gone
I felt I was supposed to pretend I was a little sad he was gone — at least, for the first few days. I told him I missed him, because I did. I’m not a complete monster.
May 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Mirage
Someone has died. Someone I loved the way I love my own hands. And I am alive in the bright, fading day, flying above the earth and sea.
May 2019
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Nomads
Einstein said that time moves at different rates throughout the universe. He must have been to Mexico, where time not only moves slower but has an altogether different texture and flavor than American time.
January 2019Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Lonely Girl’s Guide To The Cosmos
There isn’t really a reset button for life — a switch you can hit, after you’ve gone through something terrible, that lets you go back to the beginning and start over. But there should be.
November 2018
Photography
Displaced Persons
After World War II Congress voted to allow thousands of European war refugees into the U.S. Whenever a ship carrying these “displaced persons,” as they were called, came into New York City, Kalischer would go to the harbor to take pictures of the new arrivals. He had come here as a refugee himself not long before, at the age of twenty-one, and he recognized the fear and expectation in the faces of the men, women, and children.
October 2018
Poetry
That Summer Abroad
Joanne, have we ever been so free as then? / We’d change destinations / on a whim, Rome one day, / hitchhiking to Brindisi the next.
September 2018Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Short-Lived Ecstasy Bordering On Madness
Well honed by disappointment, my instincts told me this book contract was not going to work out (it wasn’t) and that the philosophical differences I had with my editor were not going to be resolved (they weren’t). But at the age of forty-three and looking at my first — and maybe last — realistic shot at a career in letters, I was like an old dog not yet willing to let go of a bone.
February 2018
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